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It’s not a huge leap to go from representing constituents to representing patients.

But for former Whitby-Oshawa MPP Christine Elliott, who is now Ontario’s first patient ombudsman, the big difference will be that her new job will come without the partisanship, heckling and drama that can overshadow life in politics.

Elliott, an MPP since 2006 when she won the riding previously held by her husband, the late Jim Flaherty, stepped down from her seat last August, just months after losing the Conservative provincial leadership contest to Patrick Brown. She had previously lost the 2009 leadership race.

“I probably shouldn’t have done it (run for leadership) the second time,” Elliott says, taking a break during the first week in her new job as patient ombudsman.

Politics, she says, reflecting on her career, was something she fell into rather than chose.

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“I never expected to go into politics. I really didn’t … there wasn’t an opportunity” before Flaherty’s seat opened up with his move to the federal scene, she says.

This time, the choice has been hers.

“When this position came along, I was really excited,” says Elliott, who has always been interested in health issues, as her party’s health critic and also as a board member of numerous health organizations.

“I thought, ‘Well, if you want to change things, you have to step up to the plate.”

It’s a significant appointment, even for someone with a decade of experience in provincial politics. Elliott, 61, a Progressive Conservative all her life, was appointed by Liberal Health Minister Eric Hoskins, beating out almost 400 other candidates.

The patient ombudsman is a $220,000-a-year job set up by the provincial government in 2014. When patients aren’t finding success with formal complaints to their hospital or care facility, they can come to her, and she will decide which cases to investigate. The role encompasses hospitals, long-term-care homes and the province’s community care access centres (CCACs). She will also file annual reports highlighting trends and problem areas for patients.

It’s a position that seems in line with Elliott’s resumé outside of politics. She has served as director or has sat on the boards of Durham Mental Health Services, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and the Lakeridge Health Whitby Foundation. She and her late husband co-founded the Abilities Centre in Whitby, which provides programs for people with disabilities.

Though she began preparations in February, her official start as ombudsman was July 1. Her office is planning a “grand opening” Sept. 19, when she’s expected to move from a temporary office to permanent and accessible digs on University Ave.’s hospital row.

As the first ombudsman, Elliott has a lot of leeway to define the position in her five-year term. But she’s being cagey about her plans.

“It’s too early to say. We need a couple of months of calls before we really know (the issues),” she says.

Elliott says her new job parallels her old one as health critic for the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario in many ways.

“I’m still getting calls from people that I know from either my community or people I interacted with as health critic.”

Elliott started her career as a lawyer in 1980 at Gilbert, Wright and Flaherty, where her future husband was a partner. The two would later leave to found Flaherty Dow Elliott & McCarthy LLP, in Whitby. Flaherty would jump to provincial politics in 1995, and Elliott won his Whitby-Ajax seat when Flaherty moved on to federal politics in 2006.

But life in the spotlight has not always been easy; her public-facing side can seem uncomfortable. In an interview, Elliott’s closed posture rarely varies. Her hands are always holding on to something, whether they’re gripping a coffee cup or locked into each other.

Outside of her dealings with media, those who work closely with her describe her as the exact opposite – warm, engaging, and full of open body language. Rob Adams, the executive director of Durham Mental Health Services, says he was struck with how approachable she was, even after leaving the agency’s board for politics.

“She’s got a good sense of humour. I could talk to her like any other colleague in the sense that I didn’t talk to her like an MPP or someone you couldn’t approach,” Adams says, adding that Elliott is “soft-spoken, but very confident.”

There are moments in the interview when she opens up — her voice gets half a percentage point louder, and her hands release each other to express her words. It happens when she talks about her two failed bids to lead the Ontario Progressive Conservative party. She ran once in 2009, losing to Tim Hudak. She tried again in 2015, and despite the support of most of her caucus, she lost again, this time to Patrick Brown.

But those days are firmly behind her, she says. After losing to Brown, she took some time to think about what she wanted to do next. Then the call for applications for the new ombudsman position was announced.

Much of her interest in the health field stems from the challenges faced by one of her triplet sons, John, who developed a mental disability and other health issues after developing encephalitis from an insect bite as an infant.

“That opened my eyes to the difficulties many families face when they have a child with special needs. That continues to be near and dear with me,” she says.

Elliott acknowledges the last few years have been difficult for the family, especially in the wake of the sudden passing of her husband. Flaherty died April 10, 2014, from a massive heart attack, after battling a rare skin condition.

The family has been slowly recovering, she says. After the first year, she talked about the difficulty of completing all the firsts — birthdays, Christmas — without him. Now, a new routine is setting in.

“The last few years have been difficult for all of us but I think we’re all much more settled now than we were a year ago,” she says.

With the new job, and the tumult of the past few years behind her, Elliott says she’s ready to look forward.

“This is a new direction. I don’t expect to go back to politics.”

What awaits Elliott

It’s still early in Christine Elliott’s mandate as Ontario’s new patient ombudsman, but here are some of the issues she’ll likely be tackling:

The CCAC system

Ontario’s Community Care Access Centres have long been a source of complaints for patients. Though multiple reforms have been proposed, and Health Minister Eric Hoskins has promised to disband them, the $2.5-billion system still exists, and is plagued with issues such as long wait times for long-term health services.

Rehabilitation services in hospitals

In her 2013 annual report, the Ontario auditor general called for the Health Ministry to revamp its rehabilitation and outpatient services. In 2015, the new auditor general, Bonnie Lysyk, followed up on that report, and noted that the recommendations were still being implemented. Over the course of the next five years, Elliott will likely hear from many patients of rehabilitation or outpatient programs.

Long-term-care homes

Another issue highlighted by Lysyk in her 2015 report, long-term care homes will be a large part of Elliott’s job. The complaint process for the homes works through a central office in the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care. In 2014, they received 3,300 complaints, of which around 1,810 were investigated. Lysyk’s report noted a problem in the time it took between when a complaint was made and when an investigation took place.

Prescription medication

Before Elliott started her job, patients made complaints to the Ontario ombudsman directly. In the ombudsman’s 2015 report, complaints are organized by ministry. For the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, the majority of complaints centre on prescription medication costs, and the various programs in Ontario that can cover them, such as the Trillium Drug Program.

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